1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to user interfaces of computing devices and, more specifically, to systems and methods for finger pose estimation on touch screen devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Tactile input is now the preferred input method on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Tactile input is also gaining traction in the desktop computer system segment and is also becoming more commonly used for interaction with large table or wall-based displays. Using the conventional technology, touchscreen displays can only recognize the point (coordinates) of tactile contact as the user input. Most capacitive touchscreens can also report the size of a contact area associated with a tactile event as described, for example, in Boring, S., Ledo, D., Chen, X., Marquardt, N., Tang, A. and Greenberg, S., The Fat Thumb: Using the Thumb's Contact Size for Single-Handed Mobile Interaction, In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI's International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Mobile HCl 2012). San Francisco, Calif., USA, 10 pages, September 21-24. However, no further information about the individual tactile input event is available using the conventional tactile input devices.
For many application, it would, however, be beneficial to capture further information related to the user-initiated tactile event, such as user finger's rotation around the vertical axis (orthogonal to the plane of the touch screen) as well as its tilt. Obtaining rotation and tilt information for a tactile input event would allow for expressive localized input gestures as well as new types of on-screen widgets that make use of the additional local input degrees of freedom.
Therefore, new and improved systems and methods for receiving tactile input from users are needed.